Pindrop recently launched IVR Anti-Fraud, which the company says is the first comprehensive call center fraud detection capable of monitoring all customer voice channel interactions.

The new Pindrop offering analyzes multiple layers of caller information within interactive voice response (IVR) system transactions and creates a risk score to help identify risky or suspicious callers.

The solution works much the same way that Pindrop's other technology works with live agent calls. That solution, which is currently being deployed in call centers in the financial services, retail, insurance, and government industries, protects nearly 500 million calls each year.

"Most companies do not have sufficient insights into customer IVR activity, much less the amount of fraud and unnecessary costs hiding there. Alarmingly, our beta test with one of the top three banks in the U.S. showed that IVR fraud rates are on par with the growing threat of live agent phone fraud," said Vijay Balasubramaniyan, Pindrop CEO and co-founder, in a statement. "Organizations are beginning to understand that the call center is exposed and what they can't hear can hurt them."

Fraudsters can use IVR systems as their gateway into more extensive fraud, explains Joe Yeager, Pindrop's product manager.

They start with automated attacks that use different account numbers, then PINs or passwords, until learning the combinations that work. They then either use this information themselves to work within the IVR to pull money out of accounts or make other illicit transactions or sell the information to others. According to Yeager, 75 percent of IVR calls stay within the system without ever going to a live agent.

Fraudsters can proceed in much the same way if the call does progress to a live agent, though the latter might involve some further security questioning by the agent or the ability to interact with an agent in such a way as not to let on to fraudulent nature of the call.

In early beta tests of IVR Anti-Fraud, Pindrop discovered that 33 percent of live agent fraud calls could have been detected at the IVR stage. For the 79 percent of calls that would never have left the IVR to reach an agent, Pindrop detects 70 percent of fraudulent calls.

The test also discovered that some fraudulent attempts lasted as long as 16 hours. Account mining attempts could include hundreds of key presses or multiple calls from the same number targeting different accounts, robotic dialing, and caller ID spoofing with multiple devices pretending to be the same phone number.

Additionally, according to a company study, call center fraud has risen 30 percent since 2014, and now occurs in one of every 2,200 calls.

Pindrop's IVR Anti-Fraud analyzes multiple layers of caller information, including reputation, network signaling, caller behavior, dual tone multifrequency (DTMF) tones, and call statistics, and provides a risk score for every call. Customers can then use custom step-up authentication procedures for risky calls, routing suspicious callers within or outside of the IVR, where they can take additional precautionary measures, such as asking for additional levels of authentication information.